in February, Trump
signed a five-point plan to assure AI makes America Great Again, down the line. The five: to promote R&D, reduce
barriers, train workers, foster trust, and compete globally, really amount to
one:

(b) The United States must drive
development of appropriate technical standards and reduce barriers to the safe
testing and deployment of AI technologies in order to enable the creation
of new AI-related industries and the adoption of AI by today's industries. [i]

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In other
words, hand the government's knowledge, resources, and labor over to private
companies.

In their
usual, contradictory way, the gatekeepers of capitalism - your officials - mandate, the future is free-market-based Ai. Of course, this is just to house-keep. The plan was already working. Venture capital funding for AI startups reached record levels in 2018,
increasing 72% compared to 2017 to $9.33bn in funding. [ii]

Digital
technologies, in general, appeal to investors.
In part, because they forego a lot of the hard inputs of manufacturing. In part, because the workforce is young and still
willing to compete against itself. And in
part, particularly with AI, because we don't really know what it does yet, they
can promise anything.

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AI has
particular-value to speculators, as it makes analysis of highly-complex data
more within reach. Yet it's important to
recall, markets themselves are a form of predictive technology, and speculators have
never really minded that their predictions and outcomes rarely coincide, so
long as they further casino capitalism.

Thus, besides
what additional risks AI brings, it inherits all the problems of the market. Namely, that its predictions are only a
synthesis of its inputs. When they fail,
as they do, we invert blame to 'market-failures', rather than the fruition of a
biased set.

According to
a recent New York University research center report (published by the AI Now
Institute, as one of 150+ studies with like conclusions), AI is adopting our hierarchies
and prejudices. The industry's overwhelmingly
white-male workforce has gifted us systems that perpetuate race and gender
biases. [iii]

For instance,
in 2016, Pro Publica ran an analysis on a proprietary algorithm, COMPAS, that predicts recidivism rates
to weigh in sentencing. It "found that
black defendants were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly
judged to be at a higher risk of recidivism, while white defendants were more
likely than black defendants to be incorrectly flagged as low risk. " At its best it proved 60% accurate. Among other miscalculations, it was incorrect
in 80% of the cases regarding violent recidivism. [iv]

Of course, (if
you're not Pro Publica) the role of our so-called free press is to glean
otherwise critical studies for their nod toward market-based solutions. In this age of fashionable, collective self-criticism,
its sexy to endite the status quo (the market-mandate), but it rarely if ever
takes outside the bounds of market-capitalism.

In this case,
the report suggests making pay-rates, harassment, and discrimination reports
public, and increasing affirmative action to dilute AI's prejudices. [v] In other words, these are market-failures. To which they prescribe market tweaks.

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Add
to that, Trump's mandate gets frequent criticism for not adding a sixth point facilitating
immigrant contributions to R&D. This,
from both sides of the isle, not as politics, certainly not to preach human
rights, but as a necessary market-adjustment.

In
sum, these are market corrections to address market-failures. Already there's a contradiction (dating much-further
back the AI). Simply put, you cannot
tweak your way out of failure.

Today,
market-failure on a grand-scale may end capitalism - and civilization - for good,
through climate-change. How confident
should we be that market-corrections will avert full-scale disaster? The common fear is that they'll produce too
little change, too late.

That's not lost on
investors. Consider the insurance
industry has openly acknowledged climate impacts for 30 years. However, they remain the largest American
investor in fossil fuels. Their response
has been to increase rates according to risk, and in a few cases withdraw from
the market, if the chance of payout was too great. (Cases in New Orleans and Atlantic City are
examples.) A recent Brookings
Institute paper, How artificial
intelligence will affect the future of energy and climate, concedes: AI
will be a central feature of climate-science, but a hyper-smart, AI-driven
energy system still won't net the 60 to 100 percent emission reduction needed
to halt global warming. [vi]

But
to say it's not up to the task already misleads us. We should not assume markets, and that
includes any market-based technology, will help, whatsoever. Rather, technology has equal ability to tighten
old controls, as to prove the efficacy of new ones. (Recall, for example, the very term 'climate
change' is a market-correction of the more informative, 'global warming'.) Common sense says, if it relies on the market
for its development, defending the market will be priority, even if that means killing
it in the long run.

To quote the
Brookings report:

AI helps make
markets more efficient and easier for analysts and market participants to
understand highly complex phenomena from the behavior of electrical power grids
to climate change. The question
is whether there is a "bias" in how AI-related technologies affect energy
supply, such as whether they're making traditional hydrocarbon suppliers more
productive faster than they make zero-carbon renewables more productive. [vii]

The author
notes, for example, AI is particularly well-suited for mapping complex
underground reservoirs and tailoring drilling methods required to mine
oil and gas from shale. That may be
true, it's better at that than managing wind farms. It's far outside my area of expertise to say. But I'd wager, the preference has more to do with
the bent of its patrons. And obviously,
it's going to do the task we set it to.

In other
words, as with race and gender issues, as with prison sentencing, so with
climate change, we've primed AI to pick the historic winners, not the rightful
ones.

Mind, the paper
still found the glass to be half-full (at least for the market).

Digital technology lets companies
amend their scale, focus, or their cargo on short notice. Thus, it incentivizes reacting to the market,
rather than building it in the Fordist sense. AI is, itself 'adaptive technology'. Ergo, AI prevails at 'adaptation-strategies'. But if that's the model - predictability, instead
of prevention - climate policy will preference "adapting to climate impacts and
implementing quick responses in case of climate emergencies", rather than taking
the broader steps to avert them.

Of course, how we develop AI, only
matters if we also implement it. That
requires a political program, outside of development. Here it should be revealed why a made-for-TV
type swindler like Trump chimes in on something big like AI. The goal, we said was to 'reduce barriers.

Notably,
the (Trump) initiative opts for a market-based approach to regulate AI. This is a good strategy. "AI could help reduce one of the greatest
dangers as societies develop adaptation strategies, which is that they commit
vast resources to adaptation without guiding resources to their greatest value.
High levels of uncertainty, along with acute private incentives that can
mis-allocate resources for example, organized
labor might favor some kinds of adaptive responses (e.g., building hardened
infrastructure) even when other less costly options are available. [viii]

The report concludes, highly-adaptive
technologies could help "tamp down
enthusiasm for regulation and make practical a greater reliance on market-based
instruments such as carbon taxes".
(Emphases mine.)

So, is AI quickly becoming capitalism's
rear guard? If yes, why are fantasizing
about our dystopian future, when it has the dystopian present in mind?

"Rob Kall is tapping in, exploring, assessing, and clarifying this important new way of thinking that has been influenced by the civil rights movement; women's movement; and new, more effective ways of doing business. This will be an important book that can make changes in our world."

Dr. Linda Seger, author of twelve books, including the best-selling Making a Good Script Great, Spiritual Steps on the Road to Success and The Better Way to Win.